The galactic patrol cruiser Parsec was coasting—as she had been for eight months. At a speed of roughly twelve to fifteen light-minutes an hour, she had been patrolling the Pass—that vast cosmic void between the II Milky Way Supergalaxy and the I Supergalaxy of Andromeda. The Parsec was so immense that a man could die in one end and be buried in space, and those on the other end wouldn't know it until they read it in their daily Space Traveler . She was a 41.261 A.D. model, only four years old,